A fresh, gripping fictional rendition of “the greatest story ever told.”
A debut novel that dramatizes the life of Jesus Christ.
Snow writes at the outset that Jesus is “the application that opens for us the possibility of an interactive life with the divine.” However, the author quickly dispenses with this computer-app conceit to settle into a far more traditional and effective enterprise: transforming the four Gospels of the New Testament into a novel. The narrator is “the Beloved Disciple,” and his story follows the standard outline of many similar works, from Taylor Caldwell’s I, Judas (1977) to Walter Wangerin’s Jesus (2005) and others. Readers meet John the Baptist and hear him preach the coming of the Messiah, then see Jesus begin his ministry and assemble his Apostles. Snow avoids the stilted language common to much biblical fiction, instead giving all his characters a clear, straightforward idiom—particularly Jesus himself, whose admonitions to his followers often sound distinctly pitched to modern readers (“First, you have to learn to sit still,” he tells a disciple. “Next, you have to finally learn to let go of all your own agendas and wait. Yes, wait, to be filled with your Father’s agendas”). Some doctrinal purists may quibble over the fact that Snow’s Jesus is very clearly depicted as a God-inspired man rather than as God himself. But what this approach may lack in Catholic theology, it more than makes up for in readability. When this human Jesus speaks to doubters, he sounds entirely believable as a passionate character: “It’s not the well person who needs a doctor but the sick,” he says at one point. “Think it through!” In order to add tension to the best-known plot climax in history, Snow introduces pages from the diary of Jerusalem’s chief priest Annas to the final act, and the gambit works: Readers will still be kept guessing, even in the midst of very familiar proceedings. The result is a first-rate historical novel that a reader of any faith will likely appreciate.
A fresh, gripping fictional rendition of “the greatest story ever told.”Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499046892
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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